right? so what facilitates this is we have people living near each other and given up on the project of desegeration so we will put in the project of corralling and controlling. like, that to me is -- and a big thing i have come to believe in writing this book is that like it is actually a priority to revive and resusitate desegregation. >> you can watch all previous after ward programs on our website: booktv.org. ..... >> good afternoon. welcome to gaithersburg book

festival. my name is mark korman a state legislator from district 16. gaithersburg is a city that supports the arts and humanities and we are pleased to bring the fabulous event thanks in part to the generous support of our sponsors and volunteers. when you see them i hope you will say thanks. please is silence your devices and if you're on social media today please use the #gbs. feedback is valuable and surveys are available here and on our website. by submitting a survey surveys available at the tent. by submitting a survey you'll be entered into a trying for $100 visa gift card and i hope you'll put that in. i will be signing books immediately after this presentation and copies of the book are on sale in the politics & prose just year right. a quick word about buying books. this is a free event, but it does help the book festival if you buy a book in the more books you buy, the more publishersrs will want to send their authors

here to speak with us. purchasing the books benefits our local economy and local jobs. i have a bag full over there myself. i hope you will join me. enjoy this program and if you're in position to do so, buy some books today. this afternoon is sharon weinberger, the book is "the imagineers of war: the untold story of darpa, the pentagon agency that changed the world." this is sharon's third book longform explanation of the research weapons and practices of the department of defense. sharon began her career as an analyst and became a journalist and author ship name to the establishment of what she's been working. sharon is now the executive policy. they deal in more ushering great morning briefing a few on everything and don't have time to find it all yourself.

the research project agencyrc darpa had a pretty solid reputation especially for denizens of the d.c. area is no spat on and contribute to things like internet in gps.oubu sharon's book is much, muchplor deeper exploring from america'ss first space agency to the president and some of its less successful were concluding research related to act debating an atmosphere of relative nucle radiation, counterinsurgencydie practices in vietnam andd superhuman soldiers who could survive unless good insight than is currently biologically possible. it's a multifaceted story of colorful personalities, frankly a lot of fanciful failures in an agency ever in search of a mission. if you get to the back of the book and look at the sources, you'll see when sharon wrote this, she did it without access to any of darpa's classified materials which frankly after reading you might wonder why any of it isn't classified at.

you'll wonder how she was able to figure this all out without access. i lurk forward to learning more. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome sharon weinberger. [applause] >> thank you, mark. i wanted to start off by thanking the gaithersburg book festival at politics & prose, both are great for writers. when you spend so many years come in my case over four years working on a book and people actually want to hear you talk about it, not just read the book, but here about what motivated you to work on it in your passions of interest, that is wonderful. for me, the opportunity to meet readers who want to share an interest and passion is also a very special opportunity, so thank you. i'm here today to talk about darpa agency. something that is more associated today with the science-fiction technology.

people have heard about it and a lot of people have, but it's still rather esoteric agency. they think of it in connection or things like stealth aircraft with drugs responsible for the targeted killings of places like afghanistan, iraq, yemen andth i elsewhere. they associated most notably perhaps at the internet traces directly back to darpa lineage, but perhaps a driverless cars just now coming into their own or to be up on your iphone with voice recognition which is directly back to darpa funding. i'm not here today to talk about so much the technology as the origins of how darpa became what it was then but maybe that time successful and at times back to unsuccessful. it goes back to my career writing on pentagon funded science and technology come as something that fascinated me for over a decade. one of the questions i ask is how science can do it in a national security -- a member of the national security state, how is it different and not funded

by several institutions or in academia or industry and why should we care about thee difference? well, the question is even more relevant today. i have given several versions of this talk over the past two months since the book came out in each time i get the talk, i've been thinking more and more about what is going on today inb the country. i initially chose this chapter and talking about today because it offends our notion of darpa technology agency because it looks at history of the vietnam war when the agency was moving beyond technology to social sciences and behavioral sciences and the role of the pentagon and social sciences. i think especially it is relevant today as we see debates in the country about proposed cuts to science and her civilian institutions commemorating civilian institutions commemorating the national of health democrats

for climate research at the same time we see a proposal to increase funding for the military and defense department while traditionally when funding for the defense department has increased, funding for darpa has increased. what i would post here today is what we see is not necessarily science but similar to what happened in the cold war, shifted funding from civil science to military funded science.it rather than say a good or bad iu thing, i would challenge everyone today to think about implications of it, whether good, bad and what that means for our country. i also chose the selection today from a chapter called lehman on the sorcerers because it's a lot about the manipulation of fact and most importantly more in a country that's been aware for 16 years come in to question the chapter races are more important than ever. the chapter takes us back to the vietnam war. which i actually argue in the book is the most important. for darpa's development and is

the origin of almost all the technologies today that we think about when we think about darpa, naming aircraft, to some extent in the internet all traces back to the tumultuous period for the country and darpa. the story of blame in on the sorcerers starts in 1966 vietnam with the psychotherapist who is sent to a prison in saigon to interview a viet cong fighter who's in prison there. part of the classical test of a lodge is indeed see anything on this card that reminds you of a? how about the top parts that appear in the picture? anything there that reminds you of a penis? do you see anything on the same thought that reminds you of a woman's vegina? neither man was in a particularly good mood.

frustrated because it's effortlessly going through these cards that refuse to diagnose personality traits in a viet cong fighter was unhappy because he was sitting in a god stirred a bus rather than planting bombs and killing americans, which is what he been doing before. so they deployed a firm based in cambridge, massachusetts and the companies that tend to vietnam in 1966 under darpa offices to help the pentagon understand the growing insurgency there. let's calibrate where we are in 1966. at that time, over 180,000 american troops in vietnam, which is as many at the height of our wars they are paid the vietcong insurgency in the meantime had grown tremendously. the pentagon papers estimated about an estimated 280,000 viet cong communist fighters by 1966. this is up for what their estimates were up about 10 in 1962.

so 10,002 max 292 going into war. there is also a doctor but it's a prison in south vietnam which included three monks who set themselves on fire, images of which were broadcast to american living room. the u.s. understood thater american intervention and the opposition to it was rising.in they didn't understand why there was opposition to the u.s. vietnamese regime, but they thought the behavioral scientists could help themhey understand. one of these people at the pentagon funded to go to vietnam and the test used at the time popular among psychotherapist would help understand the reason for the united states in the u.s. south vietnamese regime. so far at least an interview with the vietcong fighter, then failed to yield any insider.he v

they has to go through all the cars and identify something. nothing. the nasa fighter to find anything that reminded him of a person. nothing again. he was puzzled that be interviewed by a man hired by the pentagon and sensitive about his sex life. he finally asked the fighter to find a picture he simply liked or disliked. the imprisoned man who would want to sabotage reluctant to even touch the car. speaking of archives, i found the verbatim interview others back and forth in the archives which goes to the question of how do you rate in history? there's a button classified in the archives in maryland in the national archives records administration and private collections around the country. this is what the fighter replied according to the interview appeared to do not understand this picture so i do not know which ones i like and which onet i dislike. ended up spending seven weeks in vietnam during which time he collected data.

a french educated writer, student activist in hiding from a senior buddhist monk in the viacom insurgent, all for harvard deep feelings of south vietnam, but even the antigovernment buddhist monks was more cooperative. i've never seen one except on a child when he asked of a particular egg lot resembled a vagina. this is also from the final report icon in the archives archive sent to the pentagon. these are his conclusions based on the interviews. the viet cong number was it for old man and old man, strictly addressed it to space his expression was stoning flattened. he never reached out and truly responded. the only time they came alive as we've been telling of effects is. besides a great many hundreds of greater dignity. as soon as it passes a bus backn into a lethargic apathy from a pattern and commence to and

commence with lifelong and not by imprisonment. so just to remind you the entire interview is going on in prison. he was not interested in the nuance of the vietnamese politics. he praises for men about their parents, dreams and sex lights or lack thereof. after an abuse of this forum permits the problem with the people was not a thousand years of foreign domination to include french colonialism, china's imperialism and the contemporaneous americanican i intervention. instead, the root of the problem with her troubled family structure. it is my strong impression that the triad of civil rivalry and on this old the central psychological core of anti-american vietnam. so let's back up a bit.ac there's a basic question hereer but i asked myself a nice going through these darpa files, which is why was a psychotherapist setting up in vietnam? more importantly what does this have to do with have to do and darpa come away to darpa sadness person there?

this goes back to the broader question of how a scienceba conducting a national security stage in what is the role of science in the pentagon is opposed to other parts, whether academia or industry. most importantly, what implications of science conducted in the state national security and should we care. quite obviously we do. let's talk about why it dark days, created in 1950 as a direct response to sputnik and the soviet union launch of the first artificial satellite which created a political panic somewhat akin to the 9/11 attacks here in 2001, meaning it represented to think that the time in 1957 when the lunch to face. first of the soviet union was ahead in the space race which is a psychological blow to theaurs united states. the second most importantly, the technology to launch the satellite was linked to technology intercontinental ballistic missiles. the idea of the soviet union could launch a nuclear weapon attack against the united states really shattered bat post world

war ii era idea of visibility.ps in 1958, dwight d. eisenhower authorized the birth of what was then called arpanet, the advanced research projects agency. present the time the nation'sag first space agency with the creation of nafta. all of the satellite and space programs civil and military would go into this agency and the agency would do everything possible, throw bureaucracy toto the wind, cut red tape and get america into space. darpa did this successfully inis under a year and a crew eventually into what it is today, a $3 billion to your agency made up of 140 technical personnel called program managers. it still bears some of that unique traits from its early days, lack of bureaucracy and an ability to move quickly to find new projects.d unlike the national science foundation and snet is peer review to review projects. i can move very quickly. does not permit employees by

scientific managers coming for periods coming for. the two to five years to manage projects that live or die and the sailors succeed in that time. and then they move on. it has the ability unlike other parts of government to fail and hopefully succeed as well. it is the originator of so many technologies that it changed battlefields in our daily lives to include drugs, precision weapons, arpanet, driverless cars. you could argue and i think i do agree that it is the most successful research agency ever created for at least the most successful military research agency. that doesn't mean it doesn't have flaws. writing in the book, what i was trying to do with not count up how many of its projects succeed or fail, but create a history of how this agent they got to wherp it was. i think the presumption is that it goes back to the space race. the truth is that darpa was on the eighth agency for about a year and a half before nasa was

created in the civil satellite programs and the military took back its other space programs. so what i look at is what i think is the seminal period of darpa's existence and what made it what it is today, which his involvement in vietnam. i came to the conclusion that everything apart we associate with darpa comes out of vietnam and work in counterinsurgency and more critically to the extent of how extent appellate prosecutor wars today with precision weapons, computers is an outgrowth of work and specifically darpa's experience in vietnam are most failed war effort. if you think about that for ahi second, the way we wage a war is as an outgrowth of our most privy seal forever should give us pause. b it also goes to the title of the book, "the imagineers of war," because that is what darpa was at its height in the made up of people who are just developing

science and technology, but imaginary worth thinking how we fight our wars today, how will fight them tomorrow and how they come up with solutions to those wars.. it didn't always work sometimes a day. let's return for a minute to her psychotherapist to vietnam. what was going on. the research they sound ludicrous today but it was part of a much broader effort by the pentagon to study the roots from a scientific vantage point. pentagon officials realized thel war in vietnam was not going well and they also realize there was a phenomenon. we've done a lot with that. they turned to researchers rather than physicists are engineers, they said maybe the softer scientists, social scientist from anthropologist from a political scientist to help us understand what's going on. darpa got involved in this because it was about to be shut down. in 1959 to 1960 it is no longer

space agency, but they didn't have a rather creative individual ,-com,-com ma a very legendary intelligence operative by the name of bill podell. he was in my mind sort of thedew original imaginary was that i think that a nuclear confrontation with the soviet union however terrible is unlikely pair but more likely is the type of wars will be in places like southeast asia. they will be proxy wars. in 1961, the deputy director of darpa got permission from president kennedy to establish what was called the combat development and test center in saigon is going to work with the south vietnamese forces and military advisers to help them fight the jungles. so they did everything from silent aircraft to chemical pollution, better known under its nomenclature agent orange. they also started sendingarted anthropologist and social scientist to vietnam and thailand. in 1961, formally assigned by the pentagon and assignment in behavioral sciences.

to run this program, they hired a man who was a psychologist who is interested in computers. he went on to be the godfather of arpanet and the modern internet. what was going on with by the mid-1960s, darpa was being flooded by proposals from universities and independent researchers all suggesting ways to use the social sciences to help understand when and crazy i number of vietnamese in whichbet vietnamese reciting with a day rather embracing u.s. forces. the industrial complex as it does operative is some bizarre solution. my favorite one that i founded the national archives is dated august 1965 from general from electric. they wrote to darpa suggesting the company beginning a continuing open-ended contract which is every company favorite to apply his experience in technology to counterinsurgency in vietnam. his first proposal was for a lie detector, what a cold enough polygraph.

the concept was sort of like a modern which. consider the following scenario. this is directly from the letter.d consider this scenario but the situation a method of operation. a high-security central government anti-terror groupby arrived by helicopter at a village suspected of being unde covert viet cong pressure. the villagers are assembled by the local tree such that each villager can see every other villager. each individual connected to the new type of mass polygraph measures to her bit about the villagers simultaneously. imagine for a moment you are all villagers, all hooked up to this polygraph lie detector. a suspected member would bef hauled up, i guess you could say me before the assembled villagers who were all hooked up to polygraph machine would record a response, alleviating the fear that lithium format. the process contest as many people as the village desired.

this was sent to the -- pentagoi realized the technologist brings the problem solver come a really smart guy, young aeronautical engineer resume may see more days name. he was an emerging number of the secretary technocratic elite, are interested in operations research for the idea of applying mathematical principles to help decide the organizational challenges and there really was no bigger large-scale organizational challenge than product getting the vietnam war at the time. the aeronautical engineers fascinated by the social science. more importantly, he believed he could hardly social sciences, meaning apply engineering to it. he believed people could be studied and predicted the way be

engineers measure ballistic missiles. vietnam was about to become a test center to the new science of what was called human behavior.. so he came in and looked at the darpa program and said there are no numbers here. there's no science. darpa had a on staff because she spoke five languages in vietnam. they had a partly nuclear war to help popularize the idea of game series in one report for darpa posts building a moat around saigon and anti-infiltration most became so widely derided bd the press that when general abrams complained about the geography of vietnam, they could get conned to work on it. there were also in the more serious than finding a very welr known study called the viet cong motivation and morale study was interviewing prisoners. but they took one look at it and said you are telling the air force what it the air force what it wants to hear, which is a strategic communists working.he strategic timing is not working

and it began to cut off funding for the things he was pretty convinced were telling the pentagon what it wanted to hear. the pentagon needed the truth. the solution he thought he came up with was a company in cambridge. they founded by an m.i.t. professor, very well-respected cannot very well known at the pentagon. this company has risen to fame in the election of john f. kennedy by a state-by-state basis with an accuracy of 80%. harper's magazine in 1961 had called the people machine that could predict human behavior in a very well-known professor called it the social scientist preparing development of atomic weapons. they really thought that they could solve their problem. as far as me and darpa werele concerned, group like this have impeccable credentials that could help avoid problems. it seemed like a perfect solution and the fact he was to be the biggest disaster in

vietnam.ow the academics began showing up in 1966 the one of the firstslod studies was the walter schlitt study. we can laugh at the study at the time it affects some people dead.da there is a darpa official on the ground who wrote a memo. that is the methodologically deficient as to compare my in it findings. on the other hand, a very well-known pentagon scientists wrote the opposite. he said both the idea of suchdef interviews are brilliant. the four men interviewed our leaders he called it a fascinating and important paper. in fact, over the course of his time in vietnam conducted 70 studies. are there to say that the psychotherapy study with the matias. a blessing. there were worse ones. one by a professor was looking at the psychological weapons in vietnam.l under the professor's guidance, he had started testing its weapons that included things like a letter that would be

tricked into viet cong into rowling. villagers distributing the letter were strange. they also were thought to use by publishing and distributing 5000 copies with the viet cong the fee.e. these books were distributed and they did not perceive. several of the projects had quite a bit of a failure like the attempt to pro-government messages. the quote demobilized. the sorceress project, hence the chapter title which had a must of vietnamese sorcerers against the viet cong. in report without a hint of irony because the sorcerers did not think they were supposed to say. it failed lack of control over

the chosen sorcerers. darpa officials were not allof that happy with it. he thought this was the solution. he rapidly realized what was working and he looked into the contract. it was certainly a very honest scientist, realizing it failed. in his book years later, he said it failed for administrative si reasons. in the official declassified correspondence in the archives, i found over 400 memos detailing failure of fraud and incompetence. one memo that was declassified, i didn't have any. i view this as a friend to the integrity of darpa and a sword they would never get any darpa money. it was clearly not followed through with. i found this memo in the archives. he asked, please bring this after reading.

in 2012, 2013 as i was working on this book, i was interviewing seymour, decades later. see more i was in the process of updating his memoir. in 1978 he had written a wonderful book, which talked about the failure of pentagonlka funded science and he was being contacted by pentagon officials in iraq and afghanistan is suddenly found they had done this work in vietnam. who knew. and he was asked to update the books. as having an on going conversatconversat ion about iraq and afghanistan because part of my work from the darpa book was looking at revise social science work in that afghanistan how i ended up in the archives for the

psychotherapy and was again looking not a machine with social physics or predictions of human behavior to people machine an m.i.t. professor called a confrontational counterinsurgency. as m.i.t. during the interviewer is that i stumbled across the archives of the failure from decades later. i was really struck by these comparisons. i asked to see more about the failure because in this book, he just would've failed for administrative reasons. i think he didn't like to talk about personality. he wanted to concentrate on what he viewed as the failure of the overall effort. he went to a very nuanced conclusion.t the social research on the question of the phenomenon of principles to operate with a

means of measurement in observation and that didn't change the phenomenon and otherh participators. even supporting the government here, researchers flew with researchers flew with the facts and insights inform new viewpoints to understand thend government approachede differently and want to change them. the population affected by the government program is subject to the research will become sensitized to the issues by the very faceted. in the week or so after i went to m.i.t. to look at the at th archives, i started getting a slew of e-mails and he was 89, died of heart failure and his final work was selected as the memoir and helping with this book. he was sending a random notess from his time in the phnom penh asserted anecdotes and a final e-mail i got from him was the message line. read one week a day the general in i decided to take some time off and go to visit saigon. we went there on a three wheel affair with the carriage.

besides spotted a vietnamese fortuneteller behind a table through the general decided he wanted to have his fortune told and they told him he studied the newly appointed to an important position which is true because he just got his first start. he said the generals expecting s great event which was also true. in the fortuneteller said after the reason you're here in vietnam, what a marvelous signaling at the time. i didn't believe him. not bad, how right he was. he died, he was nine years old. he just finished updating his memoir on the failure of military fun and social science in vietnam, republished for as. generation of very well many pentagon officials and social scientists who are treading water with scissors in iraq and afghanistan. thank you. [applause]

i don't know how much time i have loved, but i certainly welcome any questions. is there a microphone? >> was the mass lie or ever built -- america can think a lot of uses today. >> darpa gets really mad at me because i outlined a lot of failures in the book. darpa did so many -- is that a lot of did so many things right. one of the heroic things they did was getting pressure at the time from the pentagon to look into polygraphs, lie detectorrro technology. i filed in their correspondence with the number was available and darpa turned out the proposal in a number of others that none of these things work. a lot of history sadly the good advice is being that word. don't do the polygraph. there's much we should be

studying but psychological issues in vietnam, how to interrogate better, not how to put people into a device that was better than answers but the fortuneteller. these were not people. they made mistakes, but they were trying hard to another amazing thing i found. the archives of the best use of government taxpayer money ever. but the correspondent officials, decades earlier and darpa also at the time looked at improvisev explosive devices, which are now very esoteric at the time and a submission to that said don't spend a lot of money trying to counter these devices as a black hole. there's no good way to do it. you need to stop the underlying conflict. that report was sitting in the archives of the early 1970s. in upcoming years later to spend billion dollars in organizations to counter the roadside bombs at a lot of good advice.

any other questions? i.d. him back >> yeah. so the origins of the arpanet are fascinating. i don't want to get into a chair, but if we have some timet i will. there are two myths about arpanet which became the internet. there is truth in both of them. story number one is that was an command and control communications system in case of nuclear armageddon. that is false although there are elements of truth in it. the second circuit that story has nothing to do with nuclear war. it had to do was simply it academics at computers around the country.y.r. that's also not true. in reality like a lot of things, it is very complex.

the pentagon had given two assignments to darpa in the early 1960s. one was a behavioral sciencesss assignment that i spoke about, which was to look at everything brainwashing the idea that communists were brainwashing prisoners of war is a big concern at the time. behavioral sciences encompassed all about. social science, propaganda, brainwashing, so that was one assignment. the second assignment was command and control. i spoke to the pentagon official who became secretary of defense, still very much alive. i said what were you thinking when you gave darpa this command-and-control assignment? is that i want a better command and control of nuclear weapons. what happened was that they had these two assignments that were sort of different. really quite different, but they hired the psychologists who specialize in acoustics with an interesting computer to come into darpa. he had worked out air defense

computers after world war ii,teu which basically computers used to be these exotic creatures that lived in laboratories and you would walk in, put in a punchcard and spit out an answer. after world war ii, had consoles for the first time with operators in the computers help the operator struck the radar soviet bombers. so it seems obvious now, but the idea you sit in front of a computer and used a device to interact with the computer and you have multiple people doing it at the same time was quiteat revolutionary. so we took an experience with an experience without any came into darpa. but he said was he really wasn't that interested in the social sciences and he was interested in computers, so he focused his funding on this idea of personal computing and network computing. you have this meeting of a marriott hotel by the pentagon to show people what the future

of computers to be like. someday you'll be able to access recipes on the computer. people were like who would want to do that? you know, there were so many things going on at the time, a cuban missile crisis, which also prompted interest in the command and control of nuclear weapons. how do you control your sources and pass information? he was aware of all of this, that he had this messianic and h vision. he said yes, command-and-control of nuclear weapons, but i want to change the very way that people operate with machines, that computers will become an extension of our thought process. the very idea, i don't remember the restaurant, i'm going to google it for the way that google in computers extend our thought process and some of the seminal writings back then and push it very far forward. no, arpanet was not a nuclear

command-and-control system, but the thinking behind it, it did d have to do with nuclear weapons. it had to do with the cuban missile crisis. the fact that they hired a psychologist also had to do with concerns about brainwashing and psychology. all of these factors come together. but what made darpa so important in this world was again the idea of the imaginary support, hirind people to be given broad assignments by the pentagon and hiring people with missions. i'm going to achieve the entire way people use these machines. out of that and not of this vietnam war. and the agency wasn't allowed to do anything and everything who arpanet and the internet. the downside of that and what i try to bring out in my book is the price of success is failure in the price of an important success like arpanet and the internet is important failuress by counterinsurgency and agent orange.e so this era of darpa when they

could turn entire countries like vietnam and thailand into human laboratories for science as they did the social science, they also did with chemical pollution from assertive a darpa project is not like to talk about so much today. you should see what chemical wok defoliation does for insurgent warfare from the should see about computer networking. you have tremendous successes like arpanet and then you have tremendous failures of their counterinsurgency program or like agent orange. going back to the question i posed at the beginning, you know, people cannot personal opinion about whether military funded science is good or bad. i certainly have opinions on that. but what i would rather focus on, people probably are going to change their opinions. i want people to understand the implications of military funded science. the implications are military funded science has been very successful in some areas they computers, artificial intelligence, like the arpanet, but the price are also failures

like the counterinsurgency experiment which grew to be worldwide. darpa openoffice is then panama, beirut, they were going to open up in north africa. north africa. at one point a proposal to counterinsurgency experiment inn the united states. certainly global in its ambition. looking at the legacy of, you also have to take count of failures. we have a microphone. >> yes, what is the current budget of darpa? how many employees does it have and where our headquarters? i'll start with that. >> darpa today has budgeted about 3 billion. it goes up and down. usually tied to the overall defense budget. the overall defense budget over the past 15 years has been going up and up. it's about $3 billion a year. you could say that's only 10% of

the nasa budget. but it's all discretionary. so now it has to sell and move darpa around an agile manner. it has about 140 program managers. one of the other man's but i don't fully talk about so much with the bureaucratic nitty-gritty that i love but i don't know how much other people care. these employees are all temporary. the technical personnel come in for of two to five years, but the dirty secret of darpa is the increasingly have contract personnel to stay on for decades. it's not like darpa had 140, 160 people. it also had this army ofed contractors to stay on a long time. i asked the darpa director of the 1990s. maybe this is the best thing. he said when i was director i tried to get a count of how many contract personnel we had a nobody could give me the number

and i'm the direct her. you had another part to the question. >> were headquarters? >> its location as interesting as well. when it was created in 1958, it was in the prestige ring of the pentagon a few doors down from the secretary of defense. that was the whole idea. it was the thing in 1958. newspaper headlines and allegedly a direct line to the secretary of defense or even president eisenhower. it has over the years, part of what a chronicle of the book, pushed further and further out of the pentagon. it was actually a 1967 they darpa officially launched its offices in the pentagon and its targeted in the northern virginia. first the architects building and then maybe a second one. basically it's moved four times and each time is further away from the pentagon, which is symbolic. it actually matters because it

is a reflection of our darpa has gone. you know, it has enjoyed this tremendous reputation right now by democrats and republicans alike with the engine of innovation in amado we should follow. it's also increasingly removed from the pentagon leadership. during the vietnam war, they were being hauled in front ofvi congress to ask their opinion on the war, to talk about theirlk t programs.s. i've gone to a lot of the darpa here is what the annual event and it is so marginal to the things going on in the wars that we fight today. darpa tries to argue that's a good thing. we are the agency of the future of tenures commit 20 years. that's how they see themselves today. that wasn't the darpa of 1958 when they got america into space in less than a year. they developed a nuclear weapon detection system that enabled president kennedy to enter the year of arms control but the

limited test ban treaty, the system around the world in just a couple years. even the arpanet was in science fiction. he was laying the groundwork or he quickly for computer networking. i worry sometimes that we dorazy crazy projects alluded to in the introduction in 1958 would create killer electrons by launching nuclear weapons that would pride nuclear weapons, and basically at peace shield. a padded particle beam that was powered by the great lakes. there were wild ideas then. i was always part of darpa's heritage. in some ways, i think the wild ideas are now so do more prevalent in what darpa sees itself doing. driverless cars, which started in mid-2000 was played by decades of research that itdecaf undid. that is tremendous.

i don't know quite what it does for the military, but forr society that is a tremendous success. what i asked pentagon officials today are darpa officials as they challenge me. they don't argue to vietnam. they argue with me about dedicated people. people give up their careers to conserve the country.ou that doesn't mean you can't be skeptical or critical. i argue that my problem with darpa today is that the pentagon isn't giving it good enough challenges to tackle. it's not asking you to imagine how to solve warfare. it is asking it to do things on the margin. when you look at the wars we've been fighting, war, particularly the past 16 years is notso something we can evolve our way out of the science and technology. it is a human problem. at the same time, then sending darpa ones did. not advocating they should

necessarily do that again, but it is such a tremendous resource for the country. to say we are going to give small problems to work on, though the better missile commit build a better job, i think itdi should be working on big problems. the question is, are you willing to allow it to have big successes, or are you going to do with the failures. the white house and pentagon that i don't know what the answer to that is. the current administration is sort of focus on other issues. as a mac and director of darpa right now. darpa has always been more than its director. a director can really set the course for the agency. one of the more notable directors of the 2000 was tony tether who started in the mid- 2000 with this contest in the desert. he also is one of darpa's most notable failures after 9/11

hired admiral john poindexter of the iran-contra, one of reagan's former national security adviser to an antiterrorism program at darpa. this program is called total information awareness. right after 9/11 and the idea was to create a centralized database of classified information, commercial data to transactional data, and use pattern analysis to sort a detect terrorist laws before they have been. "new york times" op-ed came out calling this an orwellian big weather system. it's certainly a concept in some respects it was a counterargument was a research program. congress moved in. they canceled the program, sort of. it got moved to the nationalce security agency and became classified. the lesson of that, we are now in 2003. either we are not going to allow darpa to have big failures. i'm not defending that program, but again, if you want to do to

have big successes, you have to in some senses but it risks a big failures and i worry today it doesn't have that mission. it doesn't have the leeway. back to the current administration, the interesting thing is its first direct or wasn't a scientist. the person who set the stage for darpa's flexibility redtape cuto it was actually a vp at genoa. who was brought in, ray johnson. he was the only sort of non-technical person ever to leave darpa, that it was he who started the rocker program and then went to nasa and said the apollo mission to the moon. he had some very good ideas. it is hard to guess who they appoint a new darpa director and who makes a good darpa are? traditionally, the ones who havo been good, and there are lots of good directors come and assert they were johnson, the first one

with the agency there were people in the 1970s who sort of listed darpa added the massive vietnam and rebuilt the agency. but you know, it is hard to guess what makes a good darpa director other than someone with a broader vision. once you listed beyond science and technology and sam going to think about the problems of warfare and how we solve that warfare. please. [inaudible] >> so, has darpa anticipated the russian hacking and a misinformation campaign that they are doing all over the world? >> now, i don't think darpa anticipated it. there were certainly a lot of officials who thought about the irony, the internet could creation has led to a higher new way of warfare. that is part of the problem.

that should be a program. that should be a problem that darpa could tackle common something of that scale. i'm sure that darpa has little a programs on the side, but really thinking about this as a majoris threat, i don't be darpa doing that today. i'm sure they might argue otherwise, but i don't see the scope of ambition to tackle problems that are really changing warfare like that. is it what?. darpa? no, the national security agency , the now where'd that we've read so much about, he ran somewhere. no, the national security agency has a lot of credit for that. is there one more quick question? >> why did the united states use atomic weapons on vietnam? >> it was considered.

oddly, a darpa funded crew looked at that question. there was a lot of reasons i was going to be disastrous. part of the problem in vietnam as we were trying to win hearts and minds. pentagon officials were really confused, like we are trying to help this government and people hate us. dropping tactical nuclear weapons were looked at by this group and first of all they were going to be militarily attacked it and probably would have done even worse. i'm not a time. t thank you so much for coming. i love questions. i love seeing readers. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> your selected to best-selling nonfiction books according to the conservative book